Can defold make a doom like game with ledges instead of everything on a single level?
Doom
Instead of
Wolfenstein
Note the various elevations in doom vs everything on one floor with Wolfenstein.
Yes sure. Defold is a 3D engine. But the toolset is currently geared towards 2D games so you’ll need to do more work yourself.
3 Likes
This is a screenshot from xcom apocalypse. Note how it is selecting a grid square 1 square up. Would this also be possible?
EDIT: How exactly more work? Create new tools or be more creative in the coding?
Also, thank you for providing the initial answer.
That looks like plain 2D so that is perfectly possible to make. This is a Defold game, for instance:
2 Likes
Not quite, it’s 2d-ish, but it allows movement in 3 dimensions (the numbers 1-9 to the right of the ray gun in the picture right below where it says hostile unit has died indicate the elevation of your viewpoint in the game and where your “cursor” is pointing, the highlighted green cube is the cursor, the darker green cube below it shows that it is at an elevation of 2). You can move along the ground as well as up and downwards in space. I saw this:
And it shows a flat topdown view. I think I could just generate several layers of levels to get the effect I want, but I’m not sure.
More questions if you guys are cool with it:
+Is procedurally generating stuff possible? Like how diablo 1 generates maps that somehow don’t have inaccessible rooms? It’s okay if it isn’t though (I think they reuse maps in xcom apocalypse).
+Is destructible environment possible (it takes some amount of damage and then is destroyed, another feature from xcom apocalypse)?
Thanks for the replies so far.
First of all, yes it can be done.
Second of all, there are many ways to achieve that effect so it depends more on how you want to do it (old school way or maybe “easier way”).
Old school way is to use classical ray casting that was used in Wolfenstein and then expanded in eg doom to give your the 3rd dimension (up/down).
A good starting point for ray casting could be this tutorial which explains the first steps of 2 dimensional ray casting.
If you want to go the “easier” way which is actually using 3D objects in 3D space there are plenty of resources in here and out there to show how that would be done.
Also later on you are showing xcom apocalypse, an isometric type of game which is totally different tech and can also be done in defold using 2D techniques in an isometric tilemap.
If you want to go that route I would recommend old tutorials like this old classic
Its very different type of games with different challenges but they can all be done in Defold. I’m thinking about doing a raycasting example myself just because… well you gotta do it once, right?
3 Likes
Yes, there are various ways to do that.
Here’s one game that does that: Labyrinth: a hack-and-slash with a shifting map
It depends on what you mean by destructible environments. If you build your game with tiles you can replace them and update your world data model accordingly.
Mesh based deformation is not really possible at the moment but there is an extension API that we want to extend with such capabilities. Working with that is a bit low level and will require C++ code though.
1 Like
Thank you for all the very useful replies so far, the destructible environment would be nice, but I could maybe deal without it
http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=SJ3shGXWlLU&p=n#/1061;1095
Note how at 17:57 in the clip the explosion happens and some parts of the environment are destroyed. Then the curtains fall down due to gravity and parts beneath them being destroyed. Other parts aren’t damaged enough to show it though and aren’t destroyed. That’s what I’m looking for, but I could deal without it or a more simplified version.
That is totally doable. Everything on screen is 2D tiles but I think they store the world as a 3D box grid, making it possible to do gravity calculations etc.
1 Like
Perfect, I’d give you all 10 likes if I could for these replies and how quickly you got them to me.
I guess I’ll have to start learning from the beginning, but as I see you guys have a nice section devoted for that in the tabs. Thank you again for your quick and informative answers.
It’s hard to give advice when two so very different games are shown. Do you want to make a first person shooter such as Doom or do you want to make a tactical strategy game with an isometric view such as X-Com? From your more recent posts it seems like X-Com is the style of game you’re after.
A game such as X-Com is totally doable in Defold. (as is a game such as Doom, but it will be more work)
BUT you have to keep in mind that there is no ready made system for either of these game types where you can draw your map and place monsters in a level editor and then that’s that. You have to dig in and do quite a bit of coding. Defold has a an editor that can be used to arrange the building blocks (called game objects) into many different kinds of games. But it’s important to understand that the building blocks we provide are fairly basic and you as a developer will have to combine these into a game. Defold is like advanced lego. Infinite possibilities but assembly is required 
4 Likes
Xcom, I should have probably asked for that first, but I for some reason defaulted to doom. I’ll have to do a lot of learning, but what worried me was whether it was possible and if it is that’s good enough for me. Thank you guys for giving me hope.
I really only have CS 135 (a basic C language course) worth of programming knowledge so far, but I do love coding (caveat… when it works :P).
Unrelated:
“The Avengers!” looks at iron man “Batteries included!” looks at captain america “Some assembly required…”
4 Likes